America’s Age of Discord

It was a thoroughly American moment and, yes, predictable.

A 20-year-old man crawls onto a rooftop with an AR-15. About 150 yards away, a vitriolic 78-year-old demagogue preaches to the faithful on a hot afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania. Then a succession of shots: pop, pop, pop.

Donald Trump, a convicted felon and insurrectionist, grabs his right ear and goes to ground. Seconds later, he emerges amid a throng of Secret Service guards. He is looking for his shoes.

And then the video captures something extraordinary: the political entrepreneur and master channeller of public discontent forces his Secret Service detail to slow down.

He doesn’t want to be rushed off the stage. Instead, he remembers the importance of narrative and the power of image. Trump then pumps one of his fists upwards and shouts, “Fight, fight, fight.”

The coliseum of the internet erupts.

“He gets shot, stands up and is still defiant to the deep state.”

“Fuck you Dems. Swing at the King. Ya best not miss.”

“May God have mercy on our enemies because we will NOT.”

Shares in gun manufacturers surge.

And in this manner an attempted political assassination has piled more fuel onto an already raging political fire. The New York Times got it all wrong. Violence is not “antithetical to America”: it is part of the American story, and this violence rolls in cycles.

The current trajectory began with calls to lock opponents up. It graduated to praising Proud Boys on the streets.

Next came the “martyrs” of the Jan. 6 insurrection and a 10-fold rise in threats against members of Congress and a doubling of threats against judges.

And wasn’t it Trump who famously boasted in 2016 in Sioux Center, Iowa, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?” He added: “It's, like, incredible." Yes, it is.

So politics has degenerated into a form of verbal and physical war in the United States (and Canada too). Steve Bannon, a right-wing agitator, Trump supporter and jailed felon, calls his daily podcast War Room. He hopes to crush his “enemies.”

Meanwhile the left argues that American democracy now faces (yet another) existential crisis and openly compares Trump to Hitler. (It gets confusing but at one point Trump’s smart VP choice, J.D. Vance, even compared his now running mate to Hitler in 2016.)

Trump, however, is something different. He was tutored by Roy Cohn in the Joseph McCarthy school of American-style tyranny.

But he does share two devastating traits with the Nazi strongman: a fondness for authoritarian rule and an electric ability to focus discontent.

America’s surging political violence is no accident and if you remain shocked, I suggest you get over it. The situation has been incubating for decades due to sustained economic violence against ordinary people. It began in the 1970s when wages began to stagnate and jobs moved overseas (and more on that in a moment).

The big question for America’s liberals, who ignored all the warning signs, is this: Can America’s polarized society skirt the kind of political violence that undid Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1930s?

Will America’s divided political class recognize that they have the tools to dampen this historic and predictable wildfire before everyone is scorched and burned in some kind of civil war?

The historian Peter Turchin, the author of End Times and Ages of Discord, has several challenging answers to these questions. His sort of good news is that many societies have arrived at the same bloody crossroads before. America is not an exception. Most of these crises resulted in great loss of life and societal breakdown. But in a few cases, such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, disaster was averted by reversing the instruments of discord.

Turchin is an interesting voice. The former bark beetle ecologist started to apply complexity science to the study of history in the 1990s. Models by Turchin and colleagues found that complex societies go through periods or waves of integration and disintegration brought about by the same universal basic forces. He readily admits this is not a novel observation.

After good years of prosperity and consensus, societies tend to enter periods of political disintegration. Cycles of violence in American history, for example, follow a clock and erupt about every 50 years.

One of these cycles can even be graphed by incidents per year and their casualty rate. It erupted in the 1920s after a destabilizing pandemic and war. That’s when rapacious business interests employed vigilante groups and police to crush labour advocates such as Industrial Workers of the World. White people butchered 300 Black people during the Tulsa massacre in 1921 while the serial killing of the Osage for their petroleum rights lasted over a decade. At the same time the Ku Klux Klan went on a lynching rampage. Meanwhile gangsters and bank robbers haunted the roadways of Middle America. Battles over race, immigration and labour kept the fires burning.

The next cycle of violence that unsettled America took place in the 1960s during my childhood as I grew up in Southern California. That’s when opposition to the Vietnam War reached a fevered pitch and riots erupted at the Democratic National Convention. Assassins felled many different political leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X. As a 13-year-old I campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy in the San Fernando Valley, and then I watched him die on television. Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers danced with violence, and the state reciprocated. It was a bloody time.

In 2010 Turchin predicted the United States would enter another cycle of instability in the 2020s. His model identified the trouble signs “stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt.” U.S. political analyst Thomas Frank offered a similar analysis in his book Listen, Liberal. The warnings were ignored.

According to Turchin, three big problems basically drive political instability and violence: popular immiseration, elite overproduction and a wealth pump that just further enriches the rich.

Immiseration, a lovely term, refers to the lives of ordinary people going to hell in terms of reduced income, diminished health (think opioid epidemic) and lower standards of living. In End Times, Turchin documents how real wages stagnated after the 1970s and how deaths by despair rose among middle-aged men. He found that rural counties that experienced real drops in lifespan for women tended to vote for Trump in 2016. In other words, political extremism has its roots in economic violence directed against ordinary people.

Elite overproduction is also a big deal. It refers to a surplus of elites, from lawyers to PhD graduates, all competing for status in an overcrowded room. When the system can’t accommodate the surplus, these frustrated elites start fighting over access to power. Many, like Trump, Bannon and Tucker Carlson, get revolutionary ideas and become “counter-elites.” Ordinary people rarely lead revolutions but counter-elites and lawyers do. Lenin, Castro and Robespierre, for example, were all lawyers.

As living standards for ordinary people decline and elites bicker like Bolsheviks, the wealth pump goes haywire, accelerating instability. Wealthy people pour more money into politics to gain more money and make the cycle worse. Most of us get the picture, whether conscious or not, because we are living in this picture.

But none of this is inevitable. After the violence of the 1920s, America’s political class came to its senses and reversed these destabilizing trends. Turchin calls it the Great Compression.

Faced with the threat of revolution and war abroad, the ruling class put aside their self-interest and adopted the right mix of reforms. At the same time the Great Depression solved the problem of too many elites by wiping out their fortunes. Roosevelt’s New Deal directly addressed the scourge of immiseration. And the government fixed the wealth pump. For starters, it taxed the rich. During the Depression the tax rate on top income earners rose from 24 to 64 per cent and then soared to 94 per cent during the Second World War. “Think about it,” writes Turchin. “During the two peaceful decades after World War II, the very rich gave away to the government nine-tenths of their income.”

Political violence almost always escalates in a divided society. Germany’s Weimar Republic makes a timely example. That’s when Hitler’s National Socialists viewed democracy and western civilization as a profound threat to German Geist and German culture. They reduced history to a murderous battle for power and survival in a population gravely impoverished by the Great Depression. And then they offered the people order and salvation from chaos.

The violence began with cheap political theatre. When an American film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front arrived in German cinemas in 1930, National Socialists took great offence. They hated the book and the movie because it portrayed war as a bloody and chaotic affair instead of a noble duty for the Fatherland.

So Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda guy, sent his brown shirts into the movie theatres. They threw stink bombs, released white mice and threatened to bludgeon viewers. It took only five days to cancel the movie. “It was a battle for power between Marxist asphalt democracy and German-conscious state morality. And for the first time in Berlin, we were able to record the fact that asphalt democracy was brought to its knees,” said Goebbels.

Soon the violence escalated into daily shootings, political assassinations and the hounding of officials from office. By the time Hitler seized power in a legitimate election in 1933, the Nazis had normalized violence in political life. He then used the law to legalize genocide. Goebbels famously noted that it “will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.”

History does not exactly repeat itself. Like the ocean, it will, however, throw big waves at any fragile democracy. The U.S. historian Timothy Synder has written eloquently on the march of fascism. It begins with the cult of personality of a leader. Then the leader’s party becomes the only legitimate party. The threat and use of violence become normal. Next, a big lie emerges: “in this case, that Trump can never lose an election.”

But Trump, a counter-elite if there ever was one, has come this far by exploiting the reality of declining living standards with fake promises to reverse them.

In End Times Turchin has offered besieged Liberals much insight on their current plight. He has reminded them that history is not liberal, rational or well managed. But his work shows that history can be prescriptive: it offers a clear and difficult path to sanity.

“Records show that societies can avert disaster,” he wrote in 2010. “We need to find ways to ameliorate the negative effects of globalization on people's well-being. Economic inequality, accompanied by burgeoning public debt, can be addressed by making tax rates more progressive. And we should not expand our system of higher education beyond the ability of the economy to absorb university graduates. An excess of young people with advanced degrees has been one of the chief causes of instability in the past.”

Is America’s political class listening?